Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2000 06:17:17 -0000
From: "Matthew Hanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Off topic: BIOS boot problems
Hello all!
I was on the road traveling the USA from last May until the middle of
October when I finally arrived back here in Long Beach, California. It was
a great trip in my pickup camper seeing friends and relatives, and visiting
some great places around the country.
I've been wrestling with a friend's PC for the past week or so now, and
haven't been getting anywhere. I thought perhpas some of the amazingly
talanted technical wizards on this list might be able to come up with a few
ideas on wat may be going on with this system. Here's the scoop:
The system:
* Windows 98-SE
* Matsonic motherboard (MS6260S)
* 32 MB RAM
* 6.2MB HDD
Here are the symptoms. Some symptoms may occur repeatedly, or mixed up with
many of the others when the system is having problems booting.
* The system will work fine for quite some time. As long as the system is
booted, shut down , and then rebooted within a few minutes, the system
functions normally. Then after a number of hours not being used, it has all
sorts of problems (listed below) completing the BIOS boot routines.
* When the BIOS has problems booting, it may take 20-40 attempts at booting
the system to finally get Windows to boot.
* The BIOS will sometimes lock up at different stages of the boot sequence.
* During several attempts to get the system to boot, and finally reaching
the DOS prompt, the keyboard often does not work.
* Often the monitor will not come on, and the system doesn't begin to boot
at all from what we can tell.
* The Reset switch often does nothing more than get a black monitor screen.
* When booting the system from a floppy, the process of booting from the
floppy disk will freeze up at different points in the boot sequence.
--------------------
Even after the Windows 98 boot sequence starts, and AFTER W98 has fully
booted, there are the following bugs:
* W98 has frozen up just before the boot sequence finishes setting up the
desktop, and is about to complete it's boot.
* W98 booted once in black and white colors only!
* Frequent lockups in W98 will result in the problems in the boot sequence
listed above to begin again.
* When W98 has locked up, and then the system was shut down and rebooted,
when Scandisk runs automatically, it will lock up at certain predictable
points in the process of checking the file system. When run manually from
the command prompt, Scandisk will run through checking 'media descriptor',
'file allocation tables', and 'directory structure', but again will lock up
a certain points in checking the 'file system.'
Is it possible that something in the BIOS setup is mis-configured? Would
upgrading the BIOS help?
Thanks kindly for any information you may be able to provide.
Matt
PS: Forgive me if this text folds again. David has already suggested I
change to Yahoo!
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